Alex Ionescu wrote:
No they are correct, most of the times the "may" means "given certain code paths", not "may" as in "uhhh... I think it could happen?"
The reason the error often happens, with GCC *AND* MSVC (see previous e-mail) is stuff like this:
BOOLEAN HaveYourDad; PVOID Pen15; ULONG YourMom;
if (YourMom) { Pen15 = ExAllocateYourDad(); HaveYourDad = TRUE; }
....
if (HaveYourDad) ExReleaseYourDad(Pen15);
In this case, the compiler might say that your Pen15 may be used without having been initialized because it doesn't realize that I'm only going to have your dad if I also already had your mom.
Had you written:
if (YourMom) ExReleaseYourDad(Pen15); the compiler would probably be smart enough to realize the side-effect.
You can't always simplify it by having a YourMum equivalent to HaveYourDad. It's a pity that compilers don't provide a way to link Pen15 to HaveYourDad. With such a hint they could realise that Pen15 is not being used uninitialised there, while checking for usages not into a HaveYourDad conditional (as well as warn you if you set HaveYourDad and Pen15 isn't set on that branch).